Far from being a cosy 'kids in the country' piece, this is a show with a dark heart; not evil, but dark like the stress and strangeness of childhood. As a kid I found it a little bit scary; I'm not sure that was the intention, but it's the result of the intense performances. Worzel is no Stan Laurel type, accident-prone but basically benign; he's a demon of chaos like Harpo Marx, intent on his own desires and not caring about anything else. He's like a young child, not understanding the world, inside a big, unwieldy and weird-looking adult's body, His terror of the shamanic Crow Man makes the latter seem frightening; his emotional torture at the hands of Aunt Sally makes her seem positively malevolent. But really she doesn't need any help; Una Stubbs makes her the most witheringly, ferociously scornful character ever to appear on screen. If the Crow Man is a shaman, she's an evil witch - and yet she, too, is simply someone who has never had bounds set to her selfishness.
It's a sad symptom of the times that the new Mackenzie Crook version has taken all these darker elements out. Increasingly we live in a Dorian Gray world, getting nastier and nastier - but we can't face the nastiness, which is kept anonymous and out of sight, while the more visible aspects of popular culture become completely sanitised.
As a grown-up, though, I can better appreciate the fun support playing by an excellent cast including the likes of Mike Berry, Bill Maynard and Joan Sims, and the comic mayhem which is like those classic pre-war comedies. And in the middle of all that there's also the sense that the scarecrows are of the soil, Green Men, representatives of an England that is now gone.
As for the kids: once the set-up is over, they're hardly in it!
